Making FIEMAP and delayed allocation play well together [LWN.net]

Making FIEMAP and delayed allocation play well together

Posted Feb 24, 2011 21:26 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1)
In reply to: Making FIEMAP and delayed allocation play well together by dougg
Parent article: Making FIEMAP and delayed allocation play well together

An extent is a group of blocks in a file laid out contiguously on disk by the filesystem. It's a filesystem concept, which is what is needed to answer your questions. O_DIRECT shouldn't change anything. If your file descriptor is for a partition or a block device, there's no filesystem, so FIEMAP will make no sense. And FIEMAP cannot possibly map to a low-level SCSI operation, since there is no filesystem knowledge at that level.

to post comments

Making FIEMAP and delayed allocation play well together

Posted Feb 24, 2011 21:57 UTC (Thu) by razb (guest, #43424) [Link] (1 responses)

I have hacked raid5+xfs several years ago. from time to time I had this delayed allocation which was a huge headache. Question , can we prevent delayed allocation ?

Making FIEMAP and delayed allocation play well together

Posted Feb 25, 2011 16:32 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Delayed allocation is a really useful technique to (among other things) keep fragmentation down and increase the size of contiguous writes hitting the disk to something closer to the umpty-megabytes-at-once which the disk would actually prefer. It's better fixed than ripped out, I'd say.

Making FIEMAP and delayed allocation play well together

Posted Feb 24, 2011 22:19 UTC (Thu) by dougg (guest, #1894) [Link]

cp seems to be using FIEMAP on the src file to detect sparseness (i.e. holes) so it doesn't waste time reading potentially a lot of zeros. Unix already has good support for generating a sparse dst (unless dst is being overwritten). Next consider 'cp /dev/sda /dev/sdb' (don't try that at home) with unmapped (aka trimmed) blocks on /dev/sda . The SCSI GET LBA STATUS command on /dev/sda would play the same role as FIEMAP.